Having finished with Heidegger, we can finally move on to phase 3 of our original project. Klossowski's seminal Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle is interesting right from the start. But the shift from the German back to the French style of philosophy is quite bracing. Heidegger is difficult to read because he writes in such an abstract and technical manner. Simple words stand in for complex concepts in a way that creates a sort of coded language. Once you crack the code, however, things speed up considerably, and, as you translate the text back into your own terms, you begin to wonder if the code was really necessary to begin with. Klossowksi, on the other hand, doesn't write in code, which makes him superficially more accessible; it's pretty clear what each sentence says. The trade off is that the nimble and allusive style of his thought means that while I think I understand a sentence or even a clause, I can't always figure out why this sentence is next to that one. The two together don't seem to express an immediately clear train of thought. As a result, the text benefits from the kind of forward-and-backward reading style I find myself adopting with Deleuze. This involves bracketing some vague guess as to a passage's meaning, reading a little further, then going back and rereading the first section using the new light cast on it by the later part, which of course then changes the context for the second section enough so that it's necessary to push on to a third bit which casts new light on the second, and etc ... With the French, we're always circling through a text, getting progressively deeper as we go.
The reason Klossowski introduces the idea of two types of culture seems to be to clarify Nietzsche's ambivalence to the concept of culture. On the one hand, Nietzsche is no systematic state philosopher interested in justifying and preserving the status quo. In this sense, he is uninterested in a culture whose highest expressions often seem designed merely to reinforce its already dominant ideas. On the other hand, Nietzsche's very personal interpretation of philosophical systems means that he's quite interested in the micro-culture internal to a philosopher that leads him to produce these systems that are sometimes (and sometimes are not) taken up as exemplary by the macro-culture. This ambiguous relationship to the concept of culture gets even more complex when we consider that micro-cultures are embedded in and partially derived from macro-cultures. So how can we evaluate whether a given culture is positive or negative, to be combatted or aspired to?
All this preamble means is that I feel the need to stop and collect my thoughts after reading chapter 1, "The Combat against Culture", even though I have no clear idea where Klossowski is headed. The basic idea of the chapter seems to be to introduce two types of "culture" that we might call macro and micro culture. Macro-culture corresponds to what we generally mean by the word culture -- the collection of artistic and scientific output we take to define the achievements of a particular society. Culture in this sense is clearly elitist; we're talking about the "high" culture of a society by which it justifies itself as "refined". Culture in the second, micro, sense, is the hierarchy of drives and passions that define what we usually call a single individual's personality. This culture too is, in Nietzsche's view, elitist. Here it's essential to understand that Nietzsche is always operating below the level of the individual subject, always discussing the unconscious or subconscious drives and impulses that we associate with psychoanalysis. An individual personality is constructed from some particular arrangement of these drives, which are always in competition with one another for power. Micro-culture, or what Klossowski calls a "culture of the affects" occurs when some particular drive is able to give expression to itself by controlling and organizing the others. An affect (a micro-cultural product) produced from this internal struggle is inherently "elitist" even if the result has nothing to do with the "high macro-culture" to which the individual belongs, because it reflects the dominance of a particular impulse over other impulses. Culture, then, is in either sense a product of politics, if we understand this word in the general sense of a competition for power among various actors.
As always with Nietzsche, the creative power of a culture is the ultimate yardstick by which to judge it. Are you for or against Life? Does the micro-culture that produces it reflect the great health of a creator able to go beyond their macro-culture and even themselves? Or is it the product of an instinct to stop, of a weariness and insecurity that seeks to eliminate further questions, to secure ourselves and reinforce our macro-cultures?
For Nietzsche, to make an assessment of Western culture always amounts to questioning it in the following manner: what can still be created from the acquisitions of our knowledge, our practices, our customs, our habits? To what degree am I the beneficiary or the victim or the dupe of these habits? (NVC, 6)
There are therefore two powers: the levelling power of gregarious thought and the erectile power of particular cases.
This allowed Nietzsche to identify those metaphysical systems commanded by moralities whose only aim is to perpetuate the reign of gregarious norms and instincts: any system that does not receive their approval cannot survive. But there also exist systems that are impracticable to the greatest number, and which are consecrated to a particular case (Heraclitus, Spinoza); and others that form a code reserved purely for a limited group (La Rochefoucauld). The metaphysics of a Kant, by contrast, harbours a behaviour that Nietzsche summarized in the image of the fox who retums to his cage after having broken out of it. (NCV, 7)
For Nietzsche, every philosophical doctrine is judged from this perspective of the life that it expresses and propagates, or, by contrast, denies and limits.
The second half of chapter 1 seems to revolve around the question of culture's elitism. Does culture require slavery, and if so, should everyone who participates in it feel guilty? Here, Klossowki quotes a young Nietzshce horrified by, but strangely sympathetic to, the communards who burned the Tuileries. Here again, we see the same ambiguity towards culture. The Paris Commune destroyed this culture because it symbolized the exploitation of what we would now call the working class. While hardly a communist, the idealistic young Nietzsche seems to have conceived this as a blow directed against the hypocrisy of a culture that pretends to value a Christian moral equality but in reality necessitates a class slavery to function. Yet on the other hand, as a lover of art and music and literature -- in short, as a lover of high culture -- Nietzsche is horrified by the destruction of these magnificent aesthetic works. Are the communards guilty of attacking culture, or is this violence justified because culture itself is guilty of exploiting all of us?
And if we are exploited, who exactly are we exploited by? Who should feel guilty? For the Marxists, the answer is obviously our capitalist masters. These idle aesthetes feel no responsibility for exploiting anyone. For Nietzsche though, the question is more complex, because so much of our culture is actually the culture of slaves, not masters. As we've seen, what's important to Nietzsche is not the materialist circumstances of a person's class, but whether what they offer us develops from their own healthy micro-culture. Since so many of our "masters" create nothing new that would rock their favored position in the macro-cultural boat, these people are effectively slaves. And the modern world multiplies these slaves into an entire bourgeois class. As Deleuze paraphrases it:
A slave does not cease to be a slave by taking power, and it is even the way of the world, or the law of its surface, to be led by slaves. (D&R, 54)
In a complicated passage, Klossowski points out that this logic is similar to Kojève's Marxist reading of Hegel's Master-Slave dialectic. Since the Master needs the acknowledgement of the Slave to feel like a Master, it turns out that the Slave, through his self-effacing labor in service of the Master, creates an entire culture that enables him to grow into his own consciousness, a consciousness that sees itself reflected in every other Slave become Master. I'm not sure how important it is though to follow the complex layers of analysis that Klossowki touches on here. The main point seems to be that Nietzsche too believes culture is guilty of exploitation, but for almost the opposite reasons the Marxists would give -- macro-culture itself is criminal because it represents the triumph of a herd of sick micro-cultures over the few singular cases of life affirming individuals.
So should the Slaves feel guilty of exploiting these 'true' Masters? Perhaps, though in fact guilt is only what the slave invents in revenge for his (initial) lack of power. Would Nietzsche prefer a system where the 'idle aesthete' really does enslave others in order to make possible the expression of his aesthetic will? Not at all. What Nietzsche is interested in is simply that there be an individual will to express itself aesthetically, that the world afford the circumstances for such a will to form at all.
... in his phantasm, Nietzsche saw the marvels of the Louvre in flames. What was important were not the marvels, but the emotions that lay at their origin. For these emotions make inequality prevail: and if inequality makes life unbearable, then 'courage and endurance' are required to bear it. (NVC, 13)
In the end, what Nietzsche wants is for us to overcome the link between inequality and guilt. This doesn't mean that we fight for a more unequal society as something necessary to produce great art. What it means is that we combat that leveling tendency of a macro-culture that tries to convince us that the inequality which prevails in a creative micro-culture is something we should feel guilty for. The combat against culture is in service of the passions that create culture. Nietzsche is searching for, "the perfect innocence of becoming," where our internal micro-culture can reflect the unequal dominance of a single instinct without needing to feel guilty for 'enslaving' all the others. It's good to be out of equilibrium. That's called being alive. And we shouldn't make ourselves feel guilty for it.
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